America's Achilles' heel

I have the flu, so I've been reading God Is Red by a Native American author, Vine Deloria. It's riveting! One of Deloria’s key points is that the way Christianity is practiced in America (and by extension, Europe) has made it the U.S.' fundamental weakness – that with the kind of Christianity that includes certitude that it is the "right" religion comes the inability to recognize and tolerate different worldviews and cosmologies¹. It also leads to the sense of entitlement that has engendered U.S. exploitation and colonization of lands throughout North and South America (and elsewhere – he doesn't mention Africa, but obviously we have done the same thing there): manifest destiny, feeling entitled to the resources of these continents, a sense that the white Christian nations have the right to do this. I think he is right to point to a parallel between feeling that one's own religion is the only "true" one and a sense of entitlement to help oneself to others' resources. He says this sense of entitlement has doomed the U.S. to internal and international conflict since its founding. (He doesn't say this, but Americans aren't alone in this: the English felt they were entitled to their empire because the Victorians were sure that "God is an Englishman." We were just following in our big sibling's footsteps. And it isn’t even just a Western thing – China justified its empire somehow, as did Japan.)

This touches on one of my major reasons for leaving the U.S. Our foreign policy since the 1800's has been a long series of covert and overt military actions on behalf of U.S. economic interests, and continues to be so. It is appalling to me to pay taxes to a government that topples democracies chosen by the people (e.g., Chile) to put authoritarian regimes in place that they think will remain friendly to U.S. corporate interests, a government that runs the School of the Americas, where we train foreign military and police forces from those authoritarian regimes, teaching them interrogation techniques and ways of controlling unruly civilian populations. If only there were a line-item veto on our tax returns where I could say that I don't want any of my tax dollars going to support such an operation. One thing I truly like about being in Australia is that I am not paying a single dollar in tax revenue to the Bush administration (John Howard is a subject for another post!). These military operations have been around for a long time. In a speech in 1933, Major General S. Butler said the following about gangsters and the military, which is chillingly still applicable today:

"There isn’t a trick in the racketeering bag that the military gang is blind to. It has its 'finger-men' to point out enemies, its 'muscle-men' to destroy enemies, its 'brain men' to plan war preparations…. It may seem odd for me, a military man, to adopt such a comparison. Truthfulness compels me to. I spent 33 years and 4 months in active military service as a member of this country's most agile military force, the Marine Corps. …. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I suspected I was just part of a racket at the time. Now I am sure of it. I helped to make Honduras 'right' for American fruit companies in 1903. I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank Boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested. During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket. Looking back on it, I feel that I could have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents."²

Is it any wonder I couldn't stomach continuing to be a part of the U.S.?

¹ Vine Deloria, Jr. God is Red: A Native View of Religion. 30th Anniversary Edition, Golden, CO: Fulcrum Press, 2003.
² Adbusters, Vol. 12(3), No. 53, May/June 2004. Details of the genocidal impact of these military actions on the indigenous people of South America are in Wade Davis, One River. New York: Touchstone/Simon & Schuster, 1996.